The same year that George Browne graduated law school, the Eastern Railroad was chartered in Massachusetts, capitalized with just $1,300.000. That was barely enough to lay a single line of tracks eight miles north from Boston to the beach hamlet of Revere, then 3 miles further to Lynn, then Salem, Marblhead, Newburyport and finally all the way to Portland, Maine. The Eastern line carried 75, 000 weekly working class commuters at fifty cents for a ticket to Lynn, a dollar to Portland. But it was so underfunded that from the beginning it struggled with shortages of equipment. and personnel.
One of the conductors would later describe the job as “...down one day and up the next, and rest the third, and brake by hand the whole way as...(the) cars were not fitted with the air brake” The Westinghouse air brake was invented shortly after the Civil War, but the Eastern did not trust it anymore than they trusted the 30 year old telegraph. The management avoided these “unnecessary” expenses, and despite its reputation for shoddiness in service and equipment, the Eastern was always able pay annual dividends to its stockholders of between 6 and 8%. It was a business model that seemed to work, at least until July of 1855 when President and Treasurer, Mr. William Tuckerman, was forced to admit that he had lost $281,000 (equivalent to $64 million today) while gambling to make corporate ends meet. (Sound familar?).
The hard nosed Mr. John Howe replaced Tukerman as President, and new blood was brought onto the board as well - including George Browne. Sixty-five of the firm's 354 employees were laid off, and the remaining workers scrambled to keep 26 trains running every day. For the time being, dividends were forgotten. In 1858 Mr. Howe stepped down and George Browne became President, at a salary of $5,000 a year (equivalent to over a $1 million today) .
After eight years of rigorous penny pinching President Browne had returned the yearly corporate dividends to 8%. According to an official company history, the Eastern's 29 locomotives, 48 yellow passenger cars (fewer than they had owned in 1858) and 13 baggage cars, were not considered “worn out until (they) had been rebuilt from one to three times” despite assurances in the annual reports that the equipment was “...equal of any first class railroad in New England”
George Browne, who signed those annual reports, even managed to pick up a cheap Confederate locomotive which had been captured by Union troops. The Eastern's maintenance chief complained this bargain was so prone to breakdowns, he refereed to it as “The Rebel”. Even after the war the 28 trains scheduled to run on the Eastern line daily still did not have “air brakes”, nor did the company use the telegraph to communicate between stations. But the 55 tired locomotives, 98 worn out passenger cars and 27 baggage cars owned by the Eastern Railroad were simply not enough to keep the system running smoothly. Delays and breakdowns were daily events,. and passenger complaints fell on deaf ears because the company was listening to the stockholders, not the customers. The Eastern was the only line servicing the fishing villages along the coast, turning them into suburbs of Boston but also making them captive customers. The stock rose to $125 a share.
Finally, in the spring of 1871, in an attempt to deal with the endemic over-stretched company, President Browne authorized doubling the shares available – increasing the working capital for the road to eight million dollars. The goal was to buy more locomotives and cars, but no one was so impolite as to point out that this was just the sort of “gamble” which had gotten poor Mr. Tuckerman into such trouble. But it was already too late.
The problem came to a head on a sweltering Saturday, August 26th, 1871. Because of the summer weekend traffic, the single track line was again overloaded. The schedule called for 152 trains this day, but the passenger load forced the overworked staff at the Eastern's Boston terminal to send out 192. They spent the day desperately jamming passengers into hastily turned around cars and dispatching trains as quickly as they could. The schedule was in tatters, the customers were grumbling about the even worse than usual service, and express trains were slipped in between scheduled ones whenever possible. Just about 8:30, as the exhausting day was finally drawing to a close, a misty fog settled in off Revere Beach, the first truly public beach in America. A local from Everett pulled into the tiny station at Revere, running 20 minutes late. And while the passengers were still edging past each other through the open doors, the rear car was suddenly illuminated by the headlight of an oncoming express, bound for Sargus at thirty miles an hour. The Sargus engineer slammed on the locomotive’s brakes, but inertial drove the following cars onward.
The collision, it would be later judged, occurred at well under 20 miles an hour. A survivor in the fatal rear car told the New York Times, “Suddenly I...saw the crowd of passengers rushing over the seats and through the aisle, and the locomotive coming like fury after them.” The cowcatcher on the front of the engine split the wooden passenger car like a can opener. Yellow painted wood was instantly converted to kindling, which the kerosene lamps illuminating the car set aflame. The engine's smokestack snapped off, along with its steam valves. Victims, struggling to catch their breath, sucked scalding air into their lungs.
Reported the Newport, Rhode Island Daily News, “The shrieks and groans of the wounded and scalded, their frantic calls for help and their wild ejaculations caused by a frenzy of pain formed a continuation of sounds such as no mortal ear desired to hear a second time...Some were pinned with splinters, some had arms and legs broken, while other were mangled beyond recognition. Many, in fact the majority of the dead, were apparently free from bruises, but the peeling skin and deathly pallor which overspread the flesh told plainly that steam and scalding water had been frightful and effective agents of death.”
Of the 75 people jammed into the last passenger car, 29 died instantly or over the next several days. Along both trains, 57 more were injured, and many more emotionally maimed for the rest of their lives. It was far from the worst rail accident in American history - 101 dead in Nashville, Tennessee in 1918 - but it was the seminal event in rail safety, thanks to Charles Frances Adams – grandson of John Quincy Adams – and director of the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners.
Adams' investigation discovered that the company had a regular policy of issuing schedule changes at the last minute, and verbally. It was a system which almost seemed designed to cause confusion, delays and accidents - and it had repeatedly caused all three. And the Commission's final report explained the failure in terms even a businessman like George Browne might understand; “A very large proportion of the rolling stock of the Eastern railroad was rendered unavailable...when it was the most needed, because trains were standing still at points of passing, waiting for other trains which were out of time...to the equal loss and inconvenience of the public and the corporation.”
Adam's report, and two coroners' juries, blamed the conductor and engineer of the express for the accident. That was as standard as citing “pilot error” in an airline crash. But Adam's report went further. It dwelt on the management of the Eastern, and it named in particular George Browne, who had directed the Eastern Railroad for fourteen years. The public agreed. Said a politician, “There is no accident in this case...only the greed of the Eastern Railroad Company”. Six months later, on February 5, 1872, George Browne resigned. His replacement invested in telegraph lines, and Westinghouse air brakes, and electric signals to warn engineers of trains ahead of them. All these improvements (and settling the civil lawsuits) cost the Eastern $510,600 (the equivalent to $90 million today). No dividends were paid in 1872, and the stock value dropped to $51 a share. In retrospect the cost of safety seemed cheap. To an ideologue, this was proof that unrestricted capitalism worked. But ideology failed to consider the moral cost of the the 29 dead and the many more scared survivors.
To escape the public outrage, George Browne left the country, living in Europe for a year. But he never altered in his views or his willingness to make them known. He even wrote letters to the London Times, correcting British politicians in their thinking. And when he came home to Boston he became a consultant for other corporations, always an advocate for the wealthy against what he termed “the vicious caprices of the populace”. In 1881 he moved to Washington, D.C., and lobbied for railroads and his vision of capitalism. He died there on April 25, 1895, at the age of 73.
By then the Eastern Railroad had been gobbled up by its competitor, The Boston and Maine. That is the nature of capitalism - its strength and its sin – at its core, it is cannibalism.
- 30 -
In 1812 the Massachusetts’s legislature contrived, with the help of Governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced "Jerry"), to redraw the lines for the Essex County Congressional District, to insure who won the elections there. According to legend it was famed painter Gilbert Stuart who first examined the bends and curves of the new district and observed that, to him at least, a map if it resembled a salamander. But whoever said it first, it was Benjamin Russell, editor of the Boston Sentinel, who renamed the proposed district a Gerrymander, after the Governor. That name now applies, as a verb, to the redrawing of congressional district boundaries (Gerrymandering) to insure the election of one particular candidate or party. And allowing politicians to control the drawing of districts has Gerrymandered all negotiations out of American politics. 
Almost as old as Gerrymanding is the word “Bunko”, meaning a fraud or a fraudulent spiel used by salesmen of bad or faked products. Police departments around the nation still have squads of officers assigned to uncovering fraud and cheating scams, named “Bunko Squads”. Some linguists say this word originated with a Mexican card game, a version of three-card monty, but that is just so much "bunk". Thirty years before the invention of the Mexican card game the word was used to describe a speech by Felix Walker, a congressman from North Carolina.
Walker had been born in 1753 in the mountains of western Virginia. He worked as a store clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, and tried homesteading with Daniel Boone in Boonsboro, Kentucky. He fought in the American Revolution, and served in the North Carolina House of Commons, the state legislature. In 1816 he was appointed to Congress, to represent the Blue Ridge ‘hollars’ and the French River valley of Buncombe Country.
The county was named after American Revolutionary War hero Colonel Edward Buncombe, who had been wounded and captured at the battle of Germantown, in 1777. Recovering from his wounds in occupied Philadelphia, one night in May, Colonel Buncombe was sleepwalking. He fell and bled to death when his wounds were reopened. The new county named in his honor was so large it was locally referred to as “The State of Buncombe.”
Facing contentious re-election in 1818 and again in 1820, Felix Walker quickly learned the value of a well publicized and well received speech. And on February 25, 1820, while the House of Representatives was debating the crucial issue of the “Missouri Compromise”, deciding wether or not to take the first step that would lead to the Civil War, Congressman Walker arose and began to pontificate about the wonders of Buncombe County.
The leadership were ready to put the matter of the Compromise to a vote, and after listening to Walker’s rambling speech for several minutes, they urged Walker to stop wasting the Congresses’ time and sit down. But Walker explained that his speech was not intended for the benefit of the congress, but for the "simple folk of Buncombe County back home". And then Walker returned to his endless platitudes.
Almost overnight Walker’s speech was transformed from being about Buncombe to being “pure Buncombe” itself. And, with a little modification in spelling, it changed from "Buncombe", to "bunkum", and then to "bunk", as in a useless, pompus and empty speech, or "bunko" a false promise intended to further a fraud.
Gobbledygook has a much simpler history than bunko, and more recent. It was the purposeful invention of the one term Mayor of San Antonio, Texas, and later Congressman, the Honorable Fontaine Muaury Maverick. The mayor served only one term because a communist had rented a meeting room in the cities' Civic Auditorium. By law, Mayor Maverick could not refuse to rent the room to anyone. But because he failed to "lock out" the commie his opponents were able to rabble rouse a riot, complete with tear gas shells being lobbed about in front of the auditorium. This typical "Texas-Hysteria”, was in response to Maury’s defense of "Freedom of Speech", and almost got him lynched. And it allowed his opponents to brand Maury himself as a communist, which led to his defeat for re-election as Mayor. But that is beside the point.
Maury Maverick later won election to Congress, where, during WWII, his honesty, intellect and energy convinced others to make him chairman of the "Small War Plants Committee", overseeing and coordinating the work of thousands of small factories contributing to the American war effort, seeking to avoid duplication of effort, shortages of raw materials and general waste. Being a man interested in results Maury quickly grew frustrated with the growing complexity of official language which prolonged the already almost endless committee meetings he had to attend. In his article for the New York Times magazine, Maury defined his new word as a type of talk which is long, vague, pompous, and uses mostly Latinised words "…when concrete nouns are replaced by abstractions and simple terms by pseudo-technical jargon…" all of which made him think of the mating call of the wild turkey’s back home, as in "gobble, gobble, gobble, gook".
In a later memorandum Maury ordered, in pure Texas style, "Anyone using the words “activation” or “implementation” will be shot”. Of course no one was executed. But perhaps because no one was, the continued human attraction to verbosity has since produced nonsense such as "Pentagonese", "Journalese", "circumlocution", and other such gobbledygook words used to describe Maury’s gobbledegook.
In an interesting (I think) side note, gobbledegook was the Maverick family’s second addition to the American lexicon. The first was their family name. There was a Maverick aboard the Mayflower. And a 17-year old apprentice, Samuel Maverick, had been struck down by 'lobster backs' at the Boston Massacre. But the most famous Maverick of all was another Samuel, this one born in Pendleton, South Carolina, in 1803.
This Maverick, Samuel Augustus, graduated from Yale in 1825 and was admitted to the bar in 1829. A year later, he ran for the South Carolina Legislature, but his anti-secession opinions contributed to his defeat. In 1835 Samuel Maverick moved to Texas. He was one of two men from the Alamo elected to the Texas Independence Convention. Thus his career in politics saved him from being butchered by Mexican soldiers. Because of his political obligations he also missed the victory at San Jacinto. Never the less, he was elected Mayor and then Treasurer of the city of San Antonio, and later served in the seventh and eighth Texas Congresses. He also dabbled in East Texas land speculation, and sometime in 1843 or 1844, as payment for a bad debt, Samuel Augustus took possession of a ranch around Matagorda Bay, Texas.
The only problem was that Maverick had no experience in ranching and no interest in learning. When he saw that every other rancher had branded their cattle, Augustus decided there was no need for him to bother with the expense of branding his. In 1847, when Samuel moved back to San Antonio, he left his cattle under the care of his ranch hands, who saw no reason to pay more attention to their jobs than their absentee boss. They let their animals wander the open range.
Cowboys who found unbranded cattle thus identified them all as the property of "Mr. Maverick", and mavericks thus became any unbranded cow or horse. Samuel Augustus Maverick favored Texas being annexated by the U.S., and after it was, he fought its secession from the Union in 1861 until he realized there was no stopping it. After the Civil War he opposed Reconstruction. When he died in 1870 he left holdings of over 300,000 acres and a reputation for independence - not being branded by any special interests. His son, Samuel Maverick jr., fought with distinction in the Civil War (for the south) and was promoted to second lieutenant.
After the civil war Maverick jr. became a lawyer, helped preserve the Alamo, donated "Maverick Park" to San Antonio, and as a judge, lived to swear in his own son, inventor of the term gobbledegook, as Mayor of San Antonio. Maverick junior died in 1936 at the age of 98. And so he never had to deal with the gobbledygook his son did.
